Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought: Disha Karnad Jani Interviews Tejas Parasher

On this episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Tejas Parasher about his first book, Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2023). In this work, Parasher incorporates, but also looks beyond, the conventional cast of activists and thinkers who proved pivotal to the anticolonial struggle in India during the twentieth century. And, in so doing, he uncovers a set of alternative visions of a post-colonial future, informed by a radical investment in participatory popular sovereignty and less beholden to the boundaries of the nation-state. While their conversation focuses on "this counter-tradition of democratic politics," Karnad Jani and Parasher also discuss other elements of the book, from how some of these Indian thinkers appropriated the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the importance of accounting for historical shifts in problem-spaces.